Jeremy Bernstein | |
---|---|
Born | Rochester, New York, U.S. | December 31, 1929
Alma mater | Harvard University (Ph.D.) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Physics, mathematics |
Doctoral advisor | Julian Schwinger |
Jeremy Bernstein (born December 31, 1929) is an American theoretical physicist and popular science writer.
Bernstein's parents, Philip S. Bernstein, a Reform rabbi, and Sophie Rubin Bernstein named him after the biblical Jeremiah, the subject of his father's masters thesis. Philip's parents were immigrants from Lithuania, while Sophie was of Russian-Jewish descent. The family moved from Rochester to New York City during World War II, when his father became head of all the Jewish chaplains in the armed forces. [1]
Bernstein studied at Harvard University, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1951, his master's in 1953, and his Ph.D. in 1955, on electromagnetic properties of deuterium, under Julian Schwinger. As a theoretical physicist, he worked on elementary particle physics and cosmology. A summer spent in Los Alamos led to a position at the Institute for Advanced Study. [2] In 1962 he became a faculty member at New York University, moving to become a professor of Physics at Stevens Institute of Technology in 1967, a position that he continues to hold as professor emeritus. [3] He has held adjunct or visiting positions at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, CERN, Oxford, the University of Islamabad, and the Ecole Polytechnique. [4]
Bernstein was involved in Project Orion, investigating the potential for nuclear pulse propulsion for use in space travel. [5]
Bernstein is a popular science writer and profiler of scientists. He was a staff writer for The New Yorker from 1961 to 1995, authoring scores of articles. [6] He has also written regularly for The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Review of Books , and Scientific American , among others. Bernstein's biographical profiles of physicists, including Robert Oppenheimer, Hans Bethe, Albert Einstein, John Stewart Bell and others, are able to draw on the experiences of personal acquaintance. [3] [4] Bernstein's latest publication was in 2018 with A Bouquet of Dyson: and Other Reflections on Science and Scientists [7]
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who is widely held to be one of the greatest and most influential scientists of all time. Best known for developing the theory of relativity, Einstein also made important contributions to quantum mechanics, and was thus a central figure in the revolutionary reshaping of the scientific understanding of nature that modern physics accomplished in the first decades of the twentieth century. His mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2, which arises from relativity theory, has been called "the world's most famous equation". He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect", a pivotal step in the development of quantum theory. His work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science.
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Sheldon Lee Glashow is a Nobel Prize-winning American theoretical physicist. He is the Metcalf Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Boston University and Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics, emeritus, at Harvard University, and is a member of the board of sponsors for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
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Yoichiro Nambu was a Japanese-American physicist and professor at the University of Chicago.
David Lindley is a British theoretical physicist and author. He holds a B.A. in theoretical physics from Cambridge University (1975–1978) and a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Sussex (1978–1981). Then he was a postdoctoral researcher at Cambridge University. From 1983 to 1986, he was a Research Fellow in the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. He then served as Technical Editor and Writer with the Central Design Group for the Superconducting Supercollider at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in Berkeley, California. He was an Associate Editor at Nature (1987–1993), a Senior Editor of Science (1994–1995), and an Associate Editor of Science News (1996–2000). Since 2000, he has been a freelance science writer and consultant.
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Gerald Feinberg was a Columbia University physicist, futurist and popular science author. He spent a year as a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and two years at the Brookhaven Laboratories. Feinberg went to Bronx High School of Science with Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow and obtained his bachelor's and graduate degrees from Columbia University. His father was Yiddish poet and journalist Leon Feinberg. Among his students were Scott Dodelson, physicist at Carnegie Mellon University.
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Don Lincoln is an American physicist, author, host of the YouTube channel Fermilab, and science communicator. He conducts research in particle physics at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and was an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame, although he is no longer affiliated with the university. He received a Ph.D. in experimental particle physics from Rice University in 1994. In 1995, he was a co-discoverer of the top quark. He has co-authored hundreds of research papers, and more recently, was a member of the team that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012.
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